Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity

Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity
Author: R. Joseph Hoffmann
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 149829359X

Hoffmann's Marcion was the first work after Harnack (1924) to call into question the patristic testimony concerning the "arch-heretic." In his work, Hoffmann challenged the conventional wisdom concerning the date, sources, and accuracy of reports on Marcion through careful and critical examination of patristic evidence. In Hoffmann's view, Marcion was the creator of the two-part canon. Theologically, his attempts to elevate Paul above the gospels ensured the enduring role of Paul in the history of the early church. Contrary to early views that Marcion was a gnostic, Hoffmann argued that Marcion was a man from an "earlier time" who demonstrates in his theology the living controversies of the early period: whether the Old Testament should be accepted or rejected; whether the God of the Old Testament and the God of the gospel are the same deity; and finally, whether the revelation of God represented in the teaching and person of Jesus Christ is definitive for the church.

Marcion

Marcion
Author: Adolf Harnack
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1556357036

Marcion and the Making of a Heretic

Marcion and the Making of a Heretic
Author: Judith Lieu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 110702904X

This study explores Marcion's ideas through his writings and the writings of early Christian polemicists who shaped the idea of heresy.

Jesus Outside the Gospels

Jesus Outside the Gospels
Author: R. Joseph Hoffman
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2010-11-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 161592695X

While the public has easy access to religious literature on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, there is little opportunity for the general reader to assess the more skeptical works of biblical criticism. In Jesus Outside the Gospels, Professor Hoffmann argues that very little is known about Jesus apart from the Gospels. He contends that the Gospels were intended to establish not the history of Jesus, but his divinity. The four books, attributed to men called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written some two generations after the events they intended to describe. Hoffmann analyzes and quotes extensively from non-biblical sources written 1,900 years ago, providing a picture of the man called Jesus that is quite different from the man portrayed in the Gospels. Sources analyzed at length are the Talmud, Josephus, and Tacitus, as well as Gnostic and Apocryphal Gospels. The author holds to a controversial view that the Gospels are in reality the missionary propaganda of a first-century messianic cult and are far from objective biographies or historical annals. Jesus Outside the Gospels is essential reading for anyone desiring a careful and critical study of the New Testament.

Marcion

Marcion
Author: Adolf von Harnack
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1990
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780939464166

Christianity

Christianity
Author: Linda Woodhead
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199687749

This is a short, accessible analysis of Christianity that focuses on its social and cultural diversity as well as its historical dimensions.

A Companion to Second-Century Christian 'Heretics'

A Companion to Second-Century Christian 'Heretics'
Author: Antti Marjanen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2008
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004170383

The book deals with thinkers and movements that were embraced by many second-century religious seekers but which are now largely forgotten or known only as "heretics": Basilides, Sethianism, Valentinus' school, Marcion, Tatian, Bardaisan, Montanists, Cerinthus, Ebionites, Nazarenes, Jewish-Christianity of the "Pseudo-Clementines," and Elchasites.

The Mythmaker

The Mythmaker
Author: Hyam Maccoby
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Publishing
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1986
Genre: Christianity
ISBN: 9780760707876

The author presents new arguments which support the view that Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity. He argues that Jesus and also his immediate disciples James and Peter were life-long adherents of Pharisaic Judaism. Paul, however, was not, as he claimed, a native-born Jew of Pharisee upbringing, but came in fact from a Gentile background. He maintains that it was Paul alone who created a new religion by his vision of Jesus as a Divine Saviour who died to save humanity. This concept, which went far beyond the messianic claims of Jesus, was an amalgamation of ideas derived from Hellenistic religion, especially from Gnosticism and the mystery cults. Paul played a devious and adventurous political game with Jesus' followers of the so-called Jerusalem Church, who eventually disowned him. The conclusions of this historical and psychological study will come as a shock to many readers, but it is nevertheless a book which cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the foundations of our culture and society. -- Book jacket.

The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria

The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria
Author: Kathleen Gibbons
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1315511487

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement’s moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity’s relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement’s work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other. While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement’s use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement’s discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of “free will” in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.